[Suggestion] So can these galaxy issues be looked at before the valkyrie comes out?

SOE actually chose to give the galaxy ammo and repair utilities, like the sunderer has. The issue is that they were working on those utilities 7-8 months ago then stopped when all development was switched to optimization and then they never went back to working on them by all accounts.

Oh, just to clarify something. It's not like I hate the valkyrie. I think it's a cool vehicle and I'm probably going to be flying one as well since I enjoy support roles, like transporting people, a lot.

This is more of a "SOE should finish updating what they have before adding in new parts" thread.

I take back all the nice things I said.

Valkyrie is slated for July.

Galaxy is slated for ...

Yep, pretty much knew it was coming but there was still that slim hope that something would change. I'd say that hope is gone though now.

Galaxy update officially going to be 1 year+ late.

Another thing that would be nice is some kind of feature that would allow you to have your people spawned into the galaxy as it is pulled. Like a queue up option that is prompted by the squad leader and each player would have to accept it, then when you pulled the galaxy each of the squad members that accepted would be automatically spawned inside the galaxy.

Did a good skywhale run with the outfit last night. Felt great.... Provided I didn't go for more than three esf or two libs at once.
But air just keeps getting more unfriendly. Everyone's mobility has increased while ours has decreased.
You just can't not be kited without some very selective or skillful flying.

We're the largest targets in game. We also have the shortest range in game. We're brawlers without the ability to close.

Well yeah, an unescorted Galaxy isn't *supposed* to be able to tear through anything in its path.

Well they need to get back to work. If I'm going to fly a Galaxy I want a steady supply of passengers, something to do when I can't find passengers, or both.

Ideally, the deal would be that I'm making runs between a zerg and the WG to provide ammo/repair support and if anyone wants a ride they can hop in while I'm picking up cargo. Yes, I believe you should have to "rearm" your Galaxy ammo/repair ability at the warpgate. The upside is that you can fly, and your support is fire and forget. The rearming time should be long enough that someone looking for a ride has a decent chance of reaching you before you take off.

If I can set a waypoint that passively displays my destination, even better.

This is a solution where everyone benefits because people on the ground have a steady stream of transports making trips between the warpgate and anywhere interesting, and the people actually flying the transports still have something to do when they are low on passengers (and thus an incentive to keep the transports going until someone happens to need them again).

Restricting it to the warpgate also helps make them predictable. Need a ride to the zerg? Go to the warpgate and a Galaxy is sure to show up before long, picking up more crates and passengers at the same time.

1. I don't mind the idea of Galaxies being able to be pulled from more points. But you have to understand that the Galaxy is always going to be a coordinated use vehicle. The Zerg has no reason to use it. Making it more available doesn't mean it will be used often.

I still support the idea however, as it helps organized squads/platoons/outfits. More support is needed for these people.

2. I think Galaxies are pretty hard to kill already. I don't think Flares need a buff nor does the composite armor. Nerfing auto repair would make it pretty useless so I don't think thats a good idea either. Frankly.. I'd leave this one alone.

3. Pretty interesting idea. I like the idea of a drop button. Especially if you only drop what you want. For example you pull a Battle Gal, you don't want to drop your gunners.

4. Again Galaxies are tough... really freakin tough. I'd leave this alone.

5. Yeah I agree with this.

6. I think this is fine too. Max racer frame makes these things pretty quick. But thats all it does, it doesn't improve steering since there's other frames for that.

Some of the posts here are just.... Cya in 6 months, maybe it'll come out by then.

Jk, in 6 months this game will probably be abandoned for that second rate zombie game.

Well said.

you know that feeling when someone says your ten thousand cert skywhale "isn't supposed to be able to fight, you're just a taxi"? I'm getting that feeling.

So.... You think that my ten thousand cert vehicle should be nothing but a zerg taxi. That's kinda what you sound like.

It's a support/utility vehicle that just happens to have a small degree of combat capability to help it get out of jams. You want a gunship? Get a Liberator.

I'd be quite happy flying a FedEx Galaxy, delivering ammo, repairs, and troops around the clock.

Great, if you're happy being a taxi all day go for it. I really doubt you've spent long as a gal though, you don't get much service with zerglings unless you're just going one base to the next. Warpgate spawning does not help that.
No, I pull a lib if I want a fast high burst damage craft. It's not a gunship, it's a fast attack craft. It doesn't have the loitering capability to be a gunship.
If I want to kill one thing very very fast before running away I pull a lib. If I want to brawl with enemy air, if I want to provide close air support to my squad, if I want to loiter in an area, if I want high effective sustained dps, I pull a galaxy.

I didn't spend ten thousand certs on a vehicle for someone to tell me that I've been doing it wrong because it doesn't match your idea of what the vehicle should be doing, and sure as hell don't say a buff to what the game calls a "galaxy gunship" is a bad idea because you think it might make it combat effective.

Mostly because balancing it would be a huge PITA and, honestly, I don't think we need a legit gunship with anywhere near the durability that the Galaxy has. Or perhaps more importantly, a legit gunship shouldn't also have such a large transport capacity because that one platform would provide way too much firepower to the squad they dropped off.

Really what this game needs is a wide selection of vehicles with highly optimized and narrowly defined roles. For example a ground support strike fighter and an air superiority fighter, rather than the "Everything Superiority Fighter".

An "AH64 style" gunship, "AC130 style" gunship, "UH60 style" transport (ie meant to land and drop off in tight spaces), and "C130" style transport (meant for parachute drops), rather than the Liberator being an awkward compromise between "AH64" and "AC130" while the Galaxy is a mashup of "AC130", "UH60", and "C130".

Of course infantry really need the same treatment. We either need a lot more classes, or loadout selections that force specialization (such as HAs having to choose between RLs and LMGs).

You're stumbling into the same mistake SOE made in the early days of working out what the Galaxy and Sunderer were for.

In PS1, the Galaxy was a troop transport and it saw a lot of use because PS1 was a game where troop movement logistics was a thing. You couldn't just warp your way around the battlefield, you had to work out how to get from point A to point B. Galaxy was the fastest way to do that.

PS2 has beacons, warp-to-defend, ESF-for-everyone, etc. that make transport vehicles a luxury. The ability to pack 11 people in the back seat of a vehicle is practically a cosmetic feature if those people can't also shoot while there. It's a luxury, and because it's a luxury it should not be considered a feature to be balanced against.

It's like saying Vanu carbines should have inferior damage because they have no bullet drop. Sounds like sense, but it turns out that no bullet drop is pretty much a cosmeitc change, and has pretty much zero impact on the combat effectiveness of the weapon.

The only thing that the 11 passenger seats on a Galaxy lets it do is hot-drop. This is a feature that is useful maybe once in that Galaxy's lifespan, maybe twice at most. If the Galaxy only had its pilot and gunner seats, it would be nearly as effective in almost all roles it performs as it is now. The only scenario it would be marginally less effective is when doing hot-drops, and given that any squad-member can pull a Galaxy the only impact on the game would be platoons calling for two galaxies per squad rather than one.

TL;DR: The ability to carry 11 passengers is a cosmetic feature, not a core feature.

That's why the Galaxy in this game could also use cargo to transport when infantry aren't available, just like we have ammo sundies and repair sundies so that sundy drivers have something to do when they lack passengers. This would allow someone who wants to play a transport to continue doing so even in the absence of passengers.

Cramming too many roles into one chassis is lazy design and bad for balance in general (looking at you, HAs and ESFs).

Though they do also need to tighten up the spawn system so that transports actually are important to a push, because that would give the game this thing called "depth". Take advantage of the game's scale rather than using all these little compartmentalized bases with their own dedicated hard spawns to negate it.

Right now the Galaxy has a role, one that doesn't get used a lot mainly because actually getting a Galaxy involves a lot of hiking across the map. It's a very good vehicle for close air support - it's not going to demolish armour columns, but for providing support for ground troops it's actually very effective.

Because it is such a priority target now thanks to squad spawn, Galaxies suffer the same problem that liberators do/did in big fights, only moreso because almost all of a Galaxy's guns are much shorter range. It has to close in to be effective, but it can't close in because it gets focus-fire'd into oblivion. Now obviously this can be countered with some good flying, but the Galaxy isn't nearly the quick-in/quick-out that the Lib is; to be effective it must stay on station. It's potent in squad v squad, it's effective in 24 v 24 and it's about right at 36 v 36. Any bigger than that and it's often relegated to slinking around the edges of the battlefield, or being used as a disposable troop dropship. The latter is a little insulting to someone who has invested heavily in their Galaxy as their primary vehicle of choice; it's like asking a Vanguard driver to spawn a Vanguard in order to drive into the teeth of enemy tanks, draw their fire for two seconds and explode. It might be useful, but the Vanguard driver probably won't be happy.

So what I'd like to see for the Galaxy isn't supply drops, because flying nowhere near the battlefield is stupidly dull. I'd like to see things that make the Galaxy better at CAS, but in a way that isn't flat buffs to survival because those are boring and risk making it OP.

There's been many suggestions on how to modify the effectiveness of the Galaxy for this kind of thing. Because it doesn't have the spike damage capability of the Liberator, the Galaxy would - for example - be a prime candidate for receiving a Vanguard-style shield or a wraith-style cloak. There's suggestions for the more passive Galaxy involving letting it land and deploy as anything from a portable wall to a cloak-bubble generator. Some people want G-AMS back, but I think there's enough space for new, different and above all tactically important roles it can fill.

But this is also in light of the other important point:

In PS2, transport isn't a thing. Which is why trying to make the Galaxy's main role be transport is not the right direction to take. Trying to refit the rest of the game so transport is a thing is in serious danger of breaking too many other aspects of the game. After all, SOE keep putting in more ways for people to get around quickly. Lets take that as an indicator of the future.

This is one of the reasons I find the Valkyrie such an affront. It's less about being a transport and more about being something with rumble seats. Rumble seats was one of the earliest suggestions for improving the Galaxy; and a Galaxy with rumble-seats would be a great step in improving the PR of the Galaxy so the average player stops thinking of it as a transport in a game that doesn't need transports.

^ I actually wrote up some ideas for both a shield and a cloak "deploy" at one time or another, will see if I can dig them up.

One thing I do remember though was that instead of a vanguard style "i win shield" (though that's not the case so much anymore) I was trying for something more like the heavy assault resist shield. Some sort of energy bar you'd have to keep track of like esfs have to with AB fuel.

Though after the recent van shield nerf it could probably be fine, though a bit boring imo.


Honestly, there isn't really a need for galaxies and that's why there aren't a lot pulled. They can help, but they're never really needed.

Until SOE throws in more support roles, like the whole transporting fuel or whatever to bases thing that was mentioned in the resource revamp, the galaxy is going to struggle overall.

Well you clearly just don't appreciate support vehicles. :/

If you go with that logic we should give the Sunderer a Halberd so we can use it as an IFV instead of a transport/support vehicle. After all, the only true measure of a vehicle's value is how much it pads your KD right?

As for supply drops being "nowhere near the battlefield", just where do you think ammo and repairs will be most needed? You'll be having to fly right over the front lines in order to keep your tanks supplied and repaired. You just won't be loitering waiting to get shot down.

One of the things I actually dislike about aircraft in PS2 is right now, they are all built with loitering as their core mechanic. You hover over the fight and Dalton/rocket pod/Bulldog everything underneath you until the AA finally gets dense enough to drive you away. I'd like to have the option of flying into the battlefield, dropping my cargo on the run, and then turning around to **** before AA gets me.